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Joan Bakewell has spent the past few weeks living in the ground floor of her
gorgeous Regency townhouse. She had a fall — leaving the central staircase
that leads up to book-crammed bathrooms and big, airy rooms filled with
self-portraits and culture-vulture coffee tables, frustratingly out of
bounds, while she recovered from a broken foot.

She is about to turn 80 next week. But her explanation of how she fell should
be a warning to anyone tempted to worry about a woman in her ninth decade
living alone in a house with three storeys of stairs. “I was rushing to get